The China Mirage

by James Bradley

  In 1877, just five years before she gave birth to Franklin, Sara returned to Hong Kong for a long visit with her sisters Annie and Dora (both had married Russell and Company partners), and she stayed at Rose Hill, where she had lived as a little girl. Years later, when Dora and Annie traveled home from Hong Kong for visits, they entertained young Franklin with pidgin English and stories of weird Chinese ways. As one Roosevelt chronicler wrote, “By the time FDR reached adulthood, Delano memories of the 1862 voyage to Hong Kong and their experiences there during the American Civil War were as real to him as if he had personally sailed… to that distant port of call to take up the life of a ‘Foreign Devil’ of China-merchant pedigree.”31

  James Roosevelt was fifty-four years old and his wife, Sara Delano, was twenty-eight when their son, Franklin, was born. James, a loving but relatively elderly father, died when Franklin was just eighteen years old. His wife, however, was a vigorous young mother who made her son her mission and dominated Franklin’s early years, even home-schooling him. One special day Sara gave her son the beloved stamp collection she had assembled from letters her father had sent her from Asia.

  Young Franklin lionized Grandpa Delano and loved to visit him at Algonac, just down the Hudson from Hyde Park. The child would race to the parlor where Warren Delano sat surrounded by Chinese art and furnishings, report his progress in school, and read his schoolboy essays as Grandpa nodded his approval. Warren was a gifted storyteller and he fired his grandson’s imagination with colorful tales of a faraway people who would be better off if they were more like Americans.

  Years later Franklin’s son Elliott admitted, “Delano ships sailing out of New Bedford made the family rich… [money] earned from the sale of opium.”32 But none of Warren’s stories told at Algonac revealed this fact. When Delano’s fellow Russell and Company partner Robert Bennet Forbes asked him to write his reminiscences about the old China trade, Warren responded with a short account that never mentioned the main source of his fortune. Geoffrey Ward, the prime chronicler of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s younger days, concluded, “In a family fond of retelling and embellishing even the mildest sort of ancestral adventures, no stories seem to have been handed down concerning Warren Delano’s genuinely adventurous career in the opium business.”33 One of his sons remembered how strictly Warren Delano “complied with the admonition not to let his right hand know what his left hand was doing.”34

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt (top) with his grandfather Warren Delano in a wheelchair (Courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum, Hyde Park, New York)

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt had five uncles, five aunts, two great-uncles, and a few great-aunts—all from his mother’s Delano line. Having no brothers or sisters except for a much older half brother from his father’s first marriage, Franklin shared his childhood with an ever-widening circle of Delano cousins. As her son grew older, Sara told Franklin that he bore a close physical resemblance to her father, which likely pleased him greatly—and she had no doubts about which side of the family he came down on character-wise. Her son, Sara was fond of saying, was “a Delano, not a Roosevelt at all.”35

  Warren Delano’s legacy would be much more than financial. His narrative became the foundation of FDR’s understanding of China. Roosevelt would tell his secretary of the treasury Henry Morgenthau, “Please remember that I have a background of a little over a century in Chinese affairs.”36

  Chapter 3

  THE JAPANESE MONROE

  DOCTRINE FOR ASIA

  Japan is playing our game.

  —President Theodore Roosevelt1

  The Mexican-American War from 1846 to 1848 resulted in Mexico’s ceding to the United States much of what is now the American West. U.S. Navy planners and their political supporters dreamed of a sea-lane across the Pacific that would connect China to America’s newly acquired ports on the West Coast—San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle.

  In 1848 the U.S. Navy’s chief oceanographer opened a new chapter in American and Japanese history with his testimony before the Naval Affairs Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives. Lieutenant Matthew Maury first focused the congressmen’s attention on a huge world globe. Maury bent down, opened a leather satchel, and withdrew a ball of string. He placed one end of the string on San Francisco and ran it to the next landfall, the independent kingdom of Hawaii. Maury wanted to show how the string could eventually get to Shanghai, for the purpose of his testimony was to secure funding for the Navy to penetrate Asia, with China—the richest and most populous country in Asia—the prime target. American coal-fired steamships could make it from San Francisco to Hawaii without re-coaling but not from Hawaii to Shanghai. The U.S. Navy needed an intermediate coaling stop and refreshment station. Maury pointed to a tiny island far out in the Pacific, just six hundred miles south of Tokyo, that could serve this function.

  The island was Chichi Jima, a beautiful slab of jade-green hills set in sparkling blue waters. (The U.S. Navy also considered Chichi Jima’s neighbor island as a candidate for American expansion, but that island was gray and had rotten-egg sulfur fumes rising from its sands. In English, its name translated to “Sulfur Island.” Its Japanese name was Iwo Jima.)

  If the U.S. Navy could acquire land on Chichi Jima and build a coaling station/refreshment stop there, then the last leg of America’s sea-lane to Asia would be in place, as the distance from Chichi Jima to Shanghai was only fifteen hundred miles.

  Japan at that time was a closed country to Americans, but it was at peace with its neighbors, bothering nobody, with no military-industrial complex. Its highly literate population enjoyed what some historians argue was the highest standard of living in the world in terms of education, health care, culture, food, and longevity.

  To “open” Japan, Commodore Matthew Perry was chosen to lead the largest U.S. naval squadron in history. The U.S. Navy wanted Japan to serve as what a twentieth-century Japanese prime minister would describe as America’s “unsinkable aircraft carrier.”2 Japan would be America’s springboard to China.

  At the time, Commodore Perry was arguably the most famous and admired naval commander in the world. Perry had mounted the largest amphibious attack in U.S. history on Mexico’s Pacific coast. He sailed to Asia with huge modern warships bristling with cannons; his armada could pulverize Japan’s wood-and-paper cities in hours. Perry brought along two books (War in Mexico and History of the War in Mexico) about his previous military exploits as gifts for the Japanese, so they’d get the message about what would happen if they resisted America’s “friendship.”

  As an explanation for Perry’s hugely expensive mission, the American public was told, somewhat vaguely, that the U.S. was going to open Japan to Western, Christian, and American civilization. Americans perceived this as a kindly outreach to help the heathen Japanese. How U.S. Navy ships packed with cannons and rifles were going to achieve such a benevolent outcome was neither questioned nor explained.

  Commodore Perry’s squadron steamed from America’s East Coast, went around Cape Town at the bottom of Africa, crossed the Indian Ocean, skirted Singapore, and then sailed up to the western New Chinas on the coast. In Hong Kong and Shanghai, Perry lived in luxury in Russell and Company palaces, surrounded by servants.

  Perry left China’s coast and headed for Tokyo. Along the way, he stopped off in Okinawa and sailed near Iwo Jima, and on the morning of June 16, 1853, Perry and his sailors rowed ashore at Chichi Jima. On behalf of the U.S. Navy, Perry purchased fifty acres of land from an American living there, fifty-eight-year-old Nathaniel Savory. The price paid was fifty dollars, four cattle, five Shanghai sheep, and six goats. The U.S. Navy now had a key stepping-stone to China. (It would be many years before I realized that my father, U.S. Navy corpsman John Bradley, fought in 1945 among Japanese islands that had been eyed ninety-two years earlier by the U.S. Navy.)

  Two weeks later, on Friday, July 8, 1853, Commodore Perry steamed into Tokyo Bay. The Japanese politely but firmly
asked him to leave, as his ships’ presence there violated Japanese law. Perry demanded a meeting. The Japanese pleaded with him to leave them alone. Perry threatened war, claiming he could muster one hundred British and American warships within a month. The Japanese reluctantly agreed to one meeting.

  When the two sides met, Perry grandly presented a custom-made gold box with President Millard Fillmore’s letter to the emperor inside. A Japanese official then gave Perry a note: “The letter being received, you will leave here.”3

  Insulted, Perry returned to his armada and threatened to attack Tokyo. Many more threats by the U.S. military caused the Japanese to give in and sign the United States–Japan Treaty of Amity and Commerce on July 29, 1858, an unequal treaty similar to the ones America had forced upon China.

  The American challenge startled and alarmed Japanese leaders. This was the era of aggressive ambition by the West. The American military had just chewed off a chunk of Mexico and was in the midst of clearing Native Americans off the fruited plain, the marauding Russian bear had Pacific intentions, and the British, Dutch, and French would soon have a string of colonies from Hong Kong to Morocco.

  The Japanese understood that Americans saw Asians as they did Indians and African slaves: a racially inferior people in need of American help. So the men around Emperor Meiji opted for a Leave Asia/Tilt West foreign policy that presented the Japanese to Americans as more Western than Asian.

  The Western powers were powerful because they threw their militaries around. Japanese leaders chanted a new national slogan: Fukoku kyohei, or “Rich country, strong military.” Japan built a Western-style military-industrial complex, something no other Asian nation would do for generations.

  “Japan’s new leaders soon concluded that they needed a counterpart to God and Christianity in the West,” my former professor John Dower wrote in Japan in War and Peace.4 These founding fathers elevated their boy emperor to a god and dressed Meiji in a Western-style military uniform with medals on his chest.

  To appear more Western, Japanese who dealt with foreigners donned Brooks Brothers suits and practiced drinking French cognac from snifters. Japan’s leaders sent college-age men abroad to study the West’s governmental and military systems.

  So successful was the Leave Asia/Tilt West policy that Americans began referring to the Japanese as the Yankees of the Far East. One American marveled that it was as if the U.S. had “unmoored Japan from the coast of Asia, and towed it across the Pacific, to place it alongside of the New World, to have the same course of life and progress.”5

  Emperor Meiji. To deal with the West’s threat, he did what no other Asian leader did: he built a modern military-industrial complex. (Mary Evans Picture Library / Everett Collection)

  Japan required large amounts of American oil and steel to build its modern Western-style military-industrial complex. Beginning soon after Commodore Perry opened Japan and, except for 1941 to 1945, continuing until recently, Japan has been America’s number-one Asian customer.

  Emperor Meiji’s most trusted confidant was Prince Hirobumi Ito, the man who helped install Meiji on his throne, wrote Meiji’s first constitution, served as Meiji’s first prime minister, and went on to serve as prime minister three more times.6 Irrespective of these formal posts, Ito was constantly at Meiji’s side. Schooled in London, Ito was a worldly man who was acquainted with several world leaders, among them Theodore Roosevelt. According to Meiji’s biographer Donald Keene, “The emperor valued Ito’s opinions more than those of anyone else.”7

  Prince Hirobumi Ito: Meiji’s most important adviser, Japan’s first prime minister, Baron Kaneko’s influencer, and admirer of Theodore Roosevelt (CPA Media / Pictures From History)

  In the spring of 1895, the fifty-four-year-old Prince Ito journeyed back to his hometown to proclaim Japan’s entrance into the league of the big powers. The little island of Japan had just shocked the world by besting huge continental China in the bitterly fought Sino-Japanese War. Ito insisted that Chinese diplomats come to Japan to negotiate peace terms. On April 17, 1895, as cherry blossoms bloomed outside, Ito sat erect across a huge table from his Chinese counterparts in the grand Shunpanro-Hall and proudly signed his name to the Treaty of Shimonoseki, which forced China to cede lands, including Taiwan, to Japan and pay an expensive indemnity. Japan had come a long way in the forty-two years since the scare of Perry’s black ships.

  Nine years after the end of Japan’s previous war, on the afternoon of Thursday, February 4, 1904, Emperor Meiji held an imperial conference with his royal advisers. The subject: whether Japan should launch a surprise attack on the Russian navy.

  The problem for Japan was that the Russians, driven by their own sense of manifest destiny, were expanding eastward. The Trans-Siberian Railway, currently under construction, could significantly alter the regional balance of power. Now Russia was focused on Manchuria, in North China, a vast land the size of Germany and France combined, with virgin forests, lush farmland, and great mineral wealth. Furthermore, the warm-water anchorage at its southernmost port would provide the czar with a naval base to make Russia a Pacific power.

  Most alarming to the Japanese was the possibility that Russia would penetrate North China, which would put Korea in play. Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany wrote to his cousin the Russian czar, “It is evident to every unbiased mind that Korea must be and will be Russian.”8 Japan had its own dreams of expansion, and because it was an island nation, its first step onto the Asian mainland had to be at the Korean Peninsula. (At their closest point, Korea and Japan are less than two hundred miles apart.) Russian control of Korea would not only squash Japanese expansionism but threaten Japan’s very existence. Prince Ito styled Korea as the “dagger pointed at the heart of Japan.”9

  Ito had tried many times to negotiate with the Russians, but the czar brushed him off, believing that the Japanese were afraid to fight mighty Christian Russia. Fearing the expansion of the Trans-Siberian Railway and the Russian threat to Korea, and outraged by the czar’s condescending treatment of Japan’s emissaries, the Japanese public howled for war.

  Emperor Meiji and Prince Ito believed there was little alternative to a military clash, but they were not optimistic about their chances. Both knew that Japan was much weaker financially and militarily than the Russian bear. To defeat the czar, Japanese forces would have to make an almost impossible march across thousands of miles of territory to St. Petersburg and then contend with the millions of men Russia had to throw into the fight. Meiji and Ito decided that the best thing Japan could do was launch a surprise attack against Russia’s navy, fight to a stalemate, and hope for a mediated peace. Looking ahead, they wondered which neutral country could mediate. The European powers were out of the question because Japan was allied with Great Britain while Russia had treaties with Germany and France. The conversation turned to Japan’s best chance: the United States and its young president, Theodore Roosevelt.

  In 1904, Japan worried about its survival. If Russia took Korea, Japan’s westward expansion would be blocked and Russia could invade Japan.

  Emperor Meiji’s conference with his advisers broke up just after five o’clock in the afternoon. Prince Ito returned home, having decided that he would dispatch a trusted lieutenant to the United States to present Japan’s case in the court of public opinion (a combination of what the Japanese called koho gaiko, “public diplomacy,” and gaikoku shinbun soju, “manipulation of foreign newspapers”). At about five thirty, Ito telephoned Baron Kentaro Kaneko at his home.

  Baron Kentaro Kaneko. The secret Roosevelt-Kaneko talks lasted nineteen months. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  Baron Kaneko was quietly celebrating his fifty-first birthday when he received Ito’s urgent phone call. The prince had been instrumental in Kaneko’s career and had sent him to Harvard to learn American ways. In 1888, Kaneko graduated from Harvard Law School, where he had studied under Oliver Wendell Holmes. When Ito became Japan’s first prime minister, Kaneko served as his secretary and he
lped Ito write Japan’s first constitution. Kaneko had visited the United States twice after his graduation from Harvard and was acquainted with many American leaders.

  Kaneko rushed through Tokyo’s darkened, wintry streets in a hired car, arriving at Ito’s doorstep about six thirty. The prince was pensive as the two men sat at a simple dinner while discussing the news of Japan’s forthcoming war and Kaneko’s relationship with Theodore Roosevelt.

  Baron Kaneko and Theodore Roosevelt shared a warm and strong bond in an era when few but the highborn attained college degrees. They had attended Harvard, America’s greatest university, at the same time, but they didn’t meet there, as Roosevelt had been an undergraduate when Kaneko attended the law school. They first connected in 1890 at Roosevelt’s Washington home, when a mutual Harvard friend provided an introduction. At that point, Kaneko had already been a prime minister’s right-hand man and the first president of Japan University. Roosevelt, serving in Washington as a civil service commissioner, would probably have been bewildered by the average Japanese, but Kaneko appeared to be an Americanized Asian, the kind most likely to appeal to Roosevelt’s patrician class. He was wellborn (of samurai blood), a titled aristocrat, and a Harvard lawyer.

  Kaneko was taken with Teddy, as he later wrote: “From the moment we first met and spoke together, I realized how great a man this was. I could see that he would surely become President in the future.”10 After Kaneko returned to Japan, the two men maintained their friendship by exchanging occasional letters and Christmas cards.

  When their dinner dishes had been cleared, Prince Ito issued Baron Kaneko his orders:

  I want you to go immediately to America… whether this war continues for one year, two years or three years, if the outcome (victory or defeat) is not clear a third country will have to come between Japan and Russia as mediator… [and] the only country we can ask to do this is America. Only President Roosevelt can stand impartially between Russia and Japan and advise them about achieving peace.… You have previously been on intimate terms with Roosevelt, so we want you to go immediately and meet him and tell him this privately, and also do your best to arouse the sympathies of the American people for Japan.11